https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/sierra-made-the-games-of-my-childhood-are-they-still-fun-to-play/
On Sat, 17 May 2025 18:53:58 -0000 (UTC), ant@zimage.comANT (Ant)
wrote:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/sierra-made-the-games-of-my-childhood-are-they-still-fun-to-play/
For some, yes, as they have youtube channels dedicated to the genre.
That includes playing these old Sierra games and it is obvious to me
that they are enjoying them.
As for me, my teen years were spent mostly playing Sierra titles. I
loved them. I own almost all of their games. And all of their hint
books as well as there is no way I could finish them without help.
But at some point, I lost interest in adventure games. It was likely
due to my growing interest in strategy games and RPGs. I go back to
playing those old Sierra adventure games once in awhile but they will
never hold the same fascination for me as they once did.
But the simple fact is that Sierra games of that era are just not as
good as most games you can play today. They are of primitive design
and even more primitive visuals and sound. They've got some good bones
to them, but modern games expect more meat on those bones than games
from the 80s can offer. You CAN enjoy those games, but you have to
really work for it. There's just a lot better games to spend your time
on.
IMHO, YMMV and other acronyms apply, as usual.
For me, I played its action games like Thexder and its Fire Hawk sequel. :P
On Sat, 17 May 2025 18:53:58 -0000 (UTC), ant@zimage.comANT (Ant)
wrote:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/sierra-made-the-games-of-my-childhood-are-they-still-fun-to-play/
For some, yes, as they have youtube channels dedicated to the genre.
That includes playing these old Sierra games and it is obvious to me
that they are enjoying them.
As for me, my teen years were spent mostly playing Sierra titles. I
loved them. I own almost all of their games. And all of their hint
books as well as there is no way I could finish them without help.
But at some point, I lost interest in adventure games. It was likely
due to my growing interest in strategy games and RPGs. I go back to
playing those old Sierra adventure games once in awhile but they will
never hold the same fascination for me as they once did.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/sierra-made-the-games-of-my-childhood-are-they-still-fun-to-play/
I'm playing the current crop of LSL games (the 2 "Wet Dreams" games) and
it's been a blast.
First time I've enjoyed a point-and-click adventure in years. Lots of
jokes about a "strawberry bush."
Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote: >>https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/sierra-made-the-games-of-my-childhood-are-they-still-fun-to-play/
I read that article and saw it as vindication of my decision back in the
day not to play the Sierra games. I've never played one, but I heard
they where hard, that the solutions to the puzzles were often obscure,
and that you died a lot. People would recommended these games to me,
but the only good thing they could say about them was how funny the death >scenes were. I remember one friend showing me one of those scenes and not >being impressed. It seemed like a cheap death, and not really that funny.
I also got the impression he hand't managed to get far in the game.
Thinking back on it, what really turned me off on adventure games in
general, and still does today, is the lack of player agency. There was
only one route through these games. You were never deciding on your own
what to do, gameplay was limited to just figuring out what you had to do.
It seems to me that Sierra games in particular, with their cheap deaths
and arbitrary puzzles, would have quickly destroyed any illusion of
player agency.
I much preferred RPGs and strategy games. Compared to adventure games
they had simpler stories and more abstract graphics, but I felt much more >like I was actually in their imaginary worlds because I had meaningful >choices to make.
On Sat, 17 May 2025 18:53:58 -0000 (UTC), in
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, Ant wrote:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/sierra-made-the-games-of-my-childhood-are-they-still-fun-to-play/
I cut my Sierra teeth on Space Quest ][. I eventually bought an official >Sierra hint book with a translucent red answer viewer, because I was
stuck on a puzzle involving a plunger. The text parser wanted something >*very* specific, and though I knew exactly what to do, I kept typing the >"wrong" thing.
On Mon, 19 May 2025 01:36:41 -0000 (UTC), ant@zimage.comANT (Ant)
wrote:
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com> wrote:
On Sat, 17 May 2025 18:53:58 -0000 (UTC), ant@zimage.comANT (Ant)
wrote:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/sierra-made-the-games-of-my-childhood-are-they-still-fun-to-play/
For some, yes, as they have youtube channels dedicated to the genre.
That includes playing these old Sierra games and it is obvious to me
that they are enjoying them.
As for me, my teen years were spent mostly playing Sierra titles. I
loved them. I own almost all of their games. And all of their hint
books as well as there is no way I could finish them without help.
But at some point, I lost interest in adventure games. It was likely
due to my growing interest in strategy games and RPGs. I go back to
playing those old Sierra adventure games once in awhile but they will
never hold the same fascination for me as they once did.
For me, I played its action games like Thexder and its Fire Hawk sequel. :P
I remember /lusting/ after Thexder when it was new. A game with a transforming robot? It was a dream come true! Nothing could be better!
Then I got the game. To say I was underwhelmed would be to do the word underwhelmed a grave diservice.
Mostly it was the controls; they were stiff and unforgiving. The
transforming required you to jump and press down at the same time, and
you automatically transformed back into robot-form the moment your
plane-form touched anything. So, of course, the developers had you
navigate through extremely narrow corridors where you constantly
banged against the walls. The combat was unsatisfying, with an
autotargeting laser that did all the work for you against enemies that
posed virtually no threat. And the production values (at least on the
Apple ][) were incredibly disappointing. There wasn't even any music!
The best part of the game was the box art. I LOVED looking at that.
But the rest of the game was trash, as far as I was concerned. It was
one of those games I kept firing up, hoping it would somehow all come together so I could finally get enjoyment out of it, but I never did.
To this day I don't think I've ever gotten past the third level, just
because I found the gameplay so unrewarding.
That didn't stop me from buyin Firehawk or Sierra's Win95 port of the original game, though. It's just a game I wanted to love so much I
kept giving it chance after chance.
TIL they ported the game to PSP. So now I have to buy that one to see
if I hate it as much as the originals ;-)
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/sierra-made-the-games-of-my-childhood-are-they-still-fun-to-play/
Still better than the Infocom "InvisiClue" books with the 'magic ink'.
At least the Sierra guides with the decoder strips still work to this
day; any answers you revealed using the magic ink pen have faded away
in the intervening four decades.
Somebody _didn't_ feed the dog the sandwich (Infocom), and _did_ feed
the mouse (Sierra).
Which games were those? If you know, you know. ;-)
On Tue, 20 May 2025 12:53:27 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson ><spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Still better than the Infocom "InvisiClue" books with the 'magic ink'.
At least the Sierra guides with the decoder strips still work to this
day; any answers you revealed using the magic ink pen have faded away
in the intervening four decades.
I own a bunch of those InvisClue books. As you said, all of the
answers I revealed years ago have now all faded away.
On Tue, 20 May 2025 09:15:32 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Somebody _didn't_ feed the dog the sandwich (Infocom), and _did_ feed
the mouse (Sierra).
Which games were those? If you know, you know. ;-)
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the Infocom one.
As for feeding a mouse in a Sierra game? I don't remember. I only
remember in King's Quest 5 you had to throw a show at a cat to save a
mouse or you were screwed later on.
ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) writes:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/sierra-made-the-games-of-my-childhood-are-they-still-fun-to-play/
Yah. Reminds me of my recent attempt with Space Quest IV. I remembered
the initial duracell bunny puzzle but after that, no idea. And there are killer bots flying around, ready to vaporize you, so not really a very interesting situation.
Mircoprose's 1992 Rex Nebular was much the same, instadeath was
common. "Hi, my name is Rex", you say. "Hi, my name is whatever" says
a girl and shoots you dead. Loads of fun, not.
And like the article said, here too just walking around and watching animations of Rex getting driven around or teleporting somewhere and especially going through the titular cosmic gender-bender took a
ridiculous amount of time.
Rex Nebular puzzles were mostly fairly easy but there's one big one I
didn't get and then a really obscure one that needs you to pick one
object right at the start and another when it seems to make little
sense. One more was really annoying, you have a tape and there's a tape
deck but you can't put the tape in the tape deck and listen to it unless
you pick up the tape deck first. Sigh.
On Tue, 20 May 2025 09:15:32 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Somebody _didn't_ feed the dog the sandwich (Infocom), and _did_ feed
the mouse (Sierra).
Which games were those? If you know, you know. ;-)
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the Infocom one.
As for feeding a mouse in a Sierra game? I don't remember. I only
remember in King's Quest 5 you had to throw a show at a cat to save a
mouse or you were screwed later on.
On Tue, 20 May 2025 00:47:21 -0000 (UTC), ant@zimage.comANT (Ant)
wrote:
Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
That didn't stop me from buyin Firehawk or Sierra's Win95 port of the
original game, though. It's just a game I wanted to love so much I
kept giving it chance after chance.
Did you like those? I enjoyed Fire Hawk, but its ending boss level was >sooooooooooooooooooooo lame! Like the developers gave up or ran of time.
I can't remember if I played W95 port.
Honestly, I remember very little about "Firehawk", except that it felt
like 'more of the same', which -given my opinion of the original- was
quite disappointing.
But at least it had music this time.
"Thexder 95" wasn't much better. It was one of the earliest
'made-for-Win95' games, and a lot of what I remember about it had less
to do with the game itself but some of the tech it used. For instance,
it was one of the earliest "Autoplay" games, where you didn't have to
install anything to your hard-drive; just stick in the CD-ROM and go (Microsoft really thought that was going to be the future of games and advertised that as a major advantage of Windows 95).
Also, it broke out its HUD into separate windows; a tiny weapon for
showing what weapons you had, another window for showing health, the
main window for the action, a fourth window for the mini-map. The idea
was you could arrange and resizethese HUD elements/windows how you
wanted (or hide them entirely), depending on your preferences and screen-size. But the end result was just to make everything look
cluttered.
The gameplay itself... well, it was pretty much original "Thexder" but
with less fluid animation and slightly nicer graphics. And since I
didn't care for the "Thexder" gameplay, I didn't stick with that
version very long either. ;-)
TIL they ported the game to PSP. So now I have to buy that one to see
if I hate it as much as the originals ;-)
I saw videos of that, but don't have consoles. Give me a PC port or
an emulator.
I don't even know if they have a Playstation Portable emulator.
(Oh look, they do. https://www.ppsspp.org/ I don't know why I
doubted).
As for feeding a mouse in a Sierra game? I don't remember. I only
remember in King's Quest 5 you had to throw a show at a cat to save a
mouse or you were screwed later on.
How do you pick up and throw a show?
On Tue, 20 May 2025 17:54:06 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:
As for feeding a mouse in a Sierra game? I don't remember. I only
remember in King's Quest 5 you had to throw a show at a cat to save a
mouse or you were screwed later on.
How do you pick up and throw a show?
Oops. Throw a SHOE* :-P
I had to reread my own post to understand what you were asking.
I lost interest in adventure games because Sierra put in a quest where
you had to pick up acorns and had to be on the exact pixel of the acorn
to get it. It was misguided.
Close. You can also feed the rat (maybe it was a mouse? Or maybe it
was the cat?) some of your food early in the game, but that only
screws you much later in the game when you need those nibbles for
something else.
But I could /almost/ forgive those sorts of puzzles. What I really
hated were the deaths caused by not making pixel-perfect movements.
This was especially bad when the on-screen character was climbing, and
they'd plummet to their death just even when climbing stairs. It was
annoying because I fled to adventure games to ESCAPE that sort of
arcade nonsense.
It's not quite the same, but there are HTML versions of the books
(complete with a nifty 'unveiling effect' as you make the answers
appear) at https://www.invisiclues.org/invisiclues
Honestly, I often found the writing in the InvisiClues books more fun
than the games themselves. ;-)
I have every InvisiClues book in .z5 format. If I can get them onto
ceramic storage, they'll survive the human race.
On Wed, 21 May 2025 11:35:15 -0500, Praetor Mandrake <horchata12839@gmail.com> wrote:
I lost interest in adventure games because Sierra put in a quest where
you had to pick up acorns and had to be on the exact pixel of the acorn
to get it. It was misguided.
Your post reminded me of both the beanstalk you need to climb in
King's Quest and the tongue you needed to climb to get out of the
whale in King's Quest 4. In both instances, you need to click on the
right spot or you fall down and have to start over.
Save early. Save often.
On Wed, 21 May 2025 11:35:15 -0500, Praetor Mandrake ><horchata12839@gmail.com> wrote:
I lost interest in adventure games because Sierra put in a quest where
you had to pick up acorns and had to be on the exact pixel of the acorn
to get it. It was misguided.
Your post reminded me of both the beanstalk you need to climb in
King's Quest and the tongue you needed to climb to get out of the
whale in King's Quest 4. In both instances, you need to click on the
right spot or you fall down and have to start over.
Save early. Save often.
See, I hate that.
Just as an example,
there are several jumping puzzles in System Shock 2 that you have to
get just right or you have to do it again. Very annoying. But System
Shock 2 is still one of my favorite games of all time.
The $@#&&*!! teeth.
They were so obviously a video-game construct that it destroyed any
sense of immersion. They had no reason for being where they were
except to provide some annoying jumping puzzles, and their mechanical >movement didn't work with the organic feel of the rest of the level.
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